Remove Finder from the Command+Tab Application Switcher in Mac OS X

The Command+Tab application switcher gets a lot use by many Mac OS X power users, and by default it will include the Finder in the apps to be able to switch to and from. If you’d rather limit the App Switcher to only swap between open applications and not include the Finder though, you’ll have to dig out the command line.

Launch the Terminal and type the following:

sudo nano /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Info.plist

You’ll need to authenticate because you are using sudo to edit a system file

Add the following strings near the top of the plist file but under “<dict>”:

<key>NSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>

That should look like this:

Now hit Control+O to save the changes, then hit Control+X to exit out of nano

Finally you must kill the Finder to relaunch it with the following command:

killall Finder

Exit out of Terminal and hit Command+Tab again to verify the change

You can undo this at any time by editing the Info.plist file again and removing the two lines you added.

This tip and topmost image come from joshdzielak.com, we modified the process slightly and chose to use the simpler nano editor rather than vi.

I use Alfred for most of my file searches and navigation, but I can’t help but notice. It seems like Finder isn’t running? The dock icon has no indicator under it and clicking on the desktop doesn’t change the Menu Bar to Finder. I can still open Finder windows with no problem, but I was just wondering, what happened to the little light?

So I did this for the sake of quicker cmd-tab switching and while it did remove Finder from the App Switcher, when I deleted the two lines of code that I wrote to reverse the process I know get the dreaded “The application Finder can’t be opened. -10810”
So now I’ve got no access to folder hierachies or any of my files really, just apps.
Also my top bar is blacked out (mostly transparent) until I open an app like Firefox or iTunes in which case it will appear and function like normal but close the app and it returns to its negative state.

On a possibly related note (since Finder is everything) I have tried multiple ways to reformat my MBP and it just hangs on the Mac OS X Installer screen until I have to Hold-Power-button-to-kill like on my good ol’ Windows PCs.

Do you know of a way to hide other apps in this way?
There are some background-apps I would like like hide.
I know of tools like WindowFlow etc. I’m only interested in hiding certain apps when using Command Tab.
Thanks for your feedback.

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